First year of marriage

Since Travis is getting married to Trisha today and next week, Tim is getting married to Cailin next week, and my sister and Chris, and Jessica and myself are all still in our first year of marriage, it reminded me of a good verse to follow for that first year:

If a man has recently married, he must not be sent to war or have any other duty laid on him. For one year he is to be free to stay at home and bring happiness to the wife he has married. (Deuteronomy 24:5 NIV)

Let that first year be one without additional distractions!

Remember 13?

This past weekend Shane and I spent time with friends and family. It was really nice to see friends that we keep meaning to hang out with. Since we got married, it has gotten so that we end up spending a lot of time alone either holed up in the house or we'll go on adventures together. Occasionally we'll go visit my mom, my brother and his family. Okay, maybe we've had a few hang out sessions with friends, but not too often.
So anyway, we brought my teenage nephew, Jacob, to the getogether... He is actually 13, and just learning that he is not necessarily viewed as a kid. Several times at the bbq, he expressed that he felt embarrassed to be the only kid there. He said,we (the group) were old! Ha ha ha!!! Go figure! I don't feel old, and I don't think any of us do! We're just twice his age and maybe feel a little older than he is! Geez!
So, he was embarrassed that he was not as old as the people there... he felt a little (maybe a lot) out of place. He later reported that he had a lot of fun that day. So I wanna shout out a thanks to Shane, Emi, Jenn, Nat, Michelle, and everyone that took the time to kick it with Jacob. Especially, Jenn for clearly defining that he is not a "kid"... I am sure that helped to reassure him that he was "in" with the older crowd. :)

Going intergalactic, planetary

I came across a Spanish language online magazine of science and technology, Tendencias 21, with an article related to my work on the unity of the heavens and the atom and túneles gravitacionales (gravitational tunnels). There's even a message board! So maybe I'll give a shot at posting in Spanish if anyone has questions (assuming I understand the questions).

Maybe Kika can help if I get stuck trying to figure out how to say "normally hyperbolic invariant manifold" in Spanish. Ahh, math, the international language of ... mystery.

greatest mass murderer of human history

As if you didn't know, Chairman Mao was a cruel, opportunistic, uncaring despot only concerned about his own hold on power. According to a new book by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, based on exhaustive interviews and the mining of previously secret documents, Chairman Mao was responsible for the deaths of no less than seventy million people, making him the greatest mass murderer of human history.

White Walnuts!

this is only a test...
btw, did ya'll see the hail today?
I both heard and saw it. It was freaky!
It looked like a bunch of white walnuts on the grass!!!

culture and politics

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.

-- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

The unity of truth

It is of utmost importance that Christian thinkers affirm the unity of all truth and expose those who would pit science against religion — whether they are scientists pretending to be philosophers or Bible students pretending to be scientists.

-- Richard John Neuhaus

Science with Attitude

Jenny apparently wasn't too impressed with the NOVA special on Einstein. And who could blame her.

As I always say, if you can't explain 4 and 10 dimensional universes to the person on the street, you probably don't understand them yourself. When will the so-called "experts" learn? Way to make science opaque, NOVA! How can they hope to demystify Einstein's discoveries for the general public by recruiting the help of specialists who specialize in speaking wacked-out lingo to other specialists?

Jenny suggested I could do a better job and should go get myself an agent. There's a niche that needs filling. One who can stand in the gap and interpret scientific discoveries to an eager, but attention deficient public.

Now is the time to strike for the big time, what with all this publicity about being a specialist in atomic physics, an engineer, rocket scientist, and ... well, whatever it is I am.

I should get a leather jacket and play up the bad boy "chaotician" image like that guy in the Jurassic park movie.

I could call my show "Science with Attitude" and drive my Harley through delicate large-scale physics experiments while explaining all the latest weirdness about "dark energy," killer robots, flying cars, time travel, and whatever-inos to the layperson. In fact, I could go on a quest to find and slay the dark energy with the help of killer robots. Yeah, man!

Other segments could include me going to big science conferences and asking basic questions to see if the scientists really know what they're doing. I could also drive into Your Town, USA and ask the folks how they are coping with the latest findings about cosmic ray bursts, etc.

temperature and fanmail

Jessica got me a temperature gauge and I've been nerding out with it around the house.

taking temperature readings of different rooms during the day and night

measuring the temp difference between the middle of a room and an open window (can be pretty high, like 10 degrees F or so)

temp difference from floor to ceiling (the floor's about 4 deg cooler)

temp under Chispita as she sits on the sofa (about 88 F)

All this is going into a master theory of when to close and open the windows to get a desired temperature change in the house. For instance, the house is about 72 F right now. Outside, it's 67 F. When the rising temp outside equals the temp inside, I figure I should close all the windows, because I won't be cooling the house off anymore. Note that we don't use big huge fans to blow air in or out of windows. If we did, I could probably cool the house down (or heat it up) faster. If you have a theory on this matter, let me know.

Speaking of which...

In other news, I've been getting some pretty weird fanmail because of a press release on the National Science Foundation webpage regarding my work on a hidden unity between the heavens and the atom. Sometime, I should post some fanmail highlights.